The TV adventurer has charmed viewers with his heroic embrace of tribal customs around the globe, but he has met his match in the Arctic

Slideshow: Bruce Parry

Bruce Parry undertook a quest to learn about tribal culture by immersing himself in the community, the rituals and the hardships of six remote tribes scattered across the globe

Photograph: Blast Films

Brace yourselves: he’s back. Bruce Parry, ex-Royal Marine, former expedition
leader, the man who went further than any television presenter has been
before by turning his penis inside out in a tribal ritual in the Amazon, is
returning to our screens from next Sunday night, and this time he’s gone
north.

Very north. Arctic, a five-part epic that took seven months to film across the
frozen wastes of Greenland, Alaska, Canada, Spitsbergen and Siberia, could
be his greatest challenge yet. He didn’t have to do anything acrobatic to
his penis, but he did have to witness “the most disgusting thing I’ve ever
seen”.

When Parry describes something as the most disgusting thing he’s ever seen,
you know it’s going to be pretty disgusting. He was hunting with the Inuit
of northern Canada and within seconds of shooting a caribou, the Inuit
beheaded it. “I’ve never been anywhere where they decapitate